A type of cloud computing in which servers provide services to clients has received attention in recent years. Cloud computing has a main feature that a great number of computing resources are used to perform data conversion and data processing in a distributed manner so that requests from a large number of clients are processed in parallel by means of distributed parallel processing. At present, there are too many vendors that provide various kinds of services by implementing Web services in a cloud computing environment that implements this kind of cloud computing. In the development of cloud services, providing new functions while exploiting services that have already been provided online provides an advantage in terms of development speed and development cost.
In cloud service coordination, due to the presence of a plurality of vendors that provide services, different security domains become an issue. In a case where a plurality of cloud services with different security domains are coordinated and used by a user, the client (user) needs to authenticate for each security domain, which can impair usability. One of the solutions is an authentication method in which, in coordination among services with different security domains, a temporary URL (or an authorization token) that is available only for a certain period of time is provided to a service user to implement Single Sign-On.
PTL 1 discloses a method in which authentication information from a client and a print data URL are saved and if authentication information input by a user matches the saved authentication information, print data is made available from the print data URL and is printed. There has hitherto been a method in which a URL is identified using authentication information.